Music never goes out of trend. Access to music is available everywhere whether on the web or mobile apps, giving rise to the popularity of streaming music services. As per the latest report by the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming music accounted for 75% of industry revenues in the US, rising by 10% from 2017.
Streaming music services allow users to stream music, podcasts, and videos online through a website or a mobile application. The success of these type of businesses depends on how well they can match the preferences of music fans by offering them their liked music.
With the rise of such platforms, entrepreneurs are wanting to provide audio streaming services similar to SoundCloud and Spotify. To help them in their endeavors, we have explained the monetization model of audio sharing businesses.
Subscription fees
You can charge subscription fees from the artists for uploading and sharing their music either on a monthly basis or annual basis. You can separately charge from consumers to access artists’ music as premium services.
SoundCloud, for example, charges $16 per month or $144 a year from artists for SoundCloud Pro Unlimited. For SoundCloud Pro, the membership fees is $8 a month or $72 a year. To access the music, users can choose the basic edition or can pay $4.99/month for premium edition termed as SoundCloud Go and $9.99/month for SoundCloud Go+ offering added benefits.
The premium version of Spotify offers an ad-free experience to users and downloading songs to their devices for offline listening. The subscription fees for students is $4.99/ month, for regular account $9.99/month and for family account (for up to six people living at the same address) the subscription amount is $14.99.
The below graph shows the success of the subscription model for Spotify.
Advertisements
Another way to earn revenues for an audio streaming website is by giving advertisements. Brands and advertisers pay for hosting their ads.
Spotify makes money from advertising in the freemium business model. The company not only earns from banner advertisements but also from audio ads that include sponsored playlists, branded playlists, video takeover, advertiser pages, etc.
Similarly, SoundCloud charges for ads from the third party and generates revenues through display, audio, and native ads including sponsorships. SoundCloud also pays to artists for advertisements when users view or listen to ads while their music is played.
Final note
Audio sharing websites like Spotify and SoundCloud, therefore, have a promising business model, which you too can incorporate to achieve success. Both subscription model, as well as advertisements, can bring in revenues to your streaming music business. You can have free service which is ad-supported and premium membership, which can be availed by paying subscription fees.
If you are looking forward to providing streaming music services, MintTM can offer you audio sharing script to kick-start your business, giving you the benefit of quick time-to-market.
For entrepreneurs wanting to start a business similar to SoundCloud or Spotify, we can provide them SoundCloud clone and Spotify clone script respectively to replicate the success of these audio distribution platforms.
Drop us an email at sales@minttm.com to get more details about our clone scripts!